Roger Ailes had an appreciation of the power of television, a sense of theatricality and a deep resentment of the “New York-Hollywood elitists.”CreditCreditIllustration by Robert Carter for The New York Times

Roger Ailes: The Man Who Mined a Divided America

The Fox News creator made a fortune creating a cultural safe space for Americans pining for the way things were.

Roger Ailes had an appreciation of the power of television, a sense of theatricality and a deep resentment of the “New York-Hollywood elitists.”CreditCreditIllustration by Robert Carter for The New York Times

Before Donald Trump rode the anger of forgotten (white) America to an “America First” presidency, before Breitbart News became a “platform for the alt-right” and before there were “alternative facts” and dueling versions of reality, Roger Ailes saw a divided country but an undivided news media. And he set out to change it.

Empowered by Rupert Murdoch, who was intent on upending the traditional news media, Mr. Ailes built a network, the Fox News Channel, that would speak to and for those Americans he said were being ignored and disrespected. They were the people who went to Friendly’s for milkshakes, flew the American flag on their car antennas and didn’t see much point in trying to “understand” America’s enemies.

His network would load its prime-time slots with opinionated talk-radio-style personalities while presenting news with an approach he called “fair and balanced,” an indictment of the rest of the news media as excessively liberal. He implicitly injected the news with politics — and set Fox to the right of its rivals — even as he professed to be doing the opposite.

When Mr. Ailes was done, his network was in first place (for 15 years running), the mainstream news media was divided and weakened and Fox News was arguably a more powerful force in American politics than either the Republican or Democratic parties.

Mr. Ailes, who died on Thursday at 77, exited Fox News with his reputation in tatters. He was ousted last summer amid allegations that he preyed on women who worked for him with offers of advancement in return for sex. He denied the claims. And in the months before his death he watched his legacy become further tarnished as similar harassment allegations led to the departure of the network’s top star, Bill O’Reilly, and a federal investigation began to examine the business practices during his tenure.

He was as divisive in death as he was in life.

Tributes rolled in through conservative talk radio and his own network: “When Roger Ailes is on your team, you do not lose” (Rush Limbaugh, on his show on Thursday); “a visionary” (Laura Ingraham, in response to an email seeking comment); “a patriot” (Shepard Smith, on his show on Fox). But they clashed with the multitudes of harsh assessments: He “made this the hate-filled moronic country it is today” (Rolling Stone); “He ushered in the post-truth society” (Jeffrey P. Jones, director of the prestigious Peabody Awards).

Aside from his own personal legacy with women, Mr. Ailes had a record as a television executive who mostly pushed boundaries in one direction — to the right, and occasionally into the conspiratorial. That was especially so in the Obama years, when Fox News “gave life to stories that became memes on the right — czars in the White House; the I.R.S. story; Benghazi — that helped set the agenda for Republicans in Congress,” as the Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote to me in an email.

Yet there’s no denying that Mr. Ailes played a singular role in changing the news media landscape.

He worked in television from its earliest days, dabbled in the New York theater world and operated at the highest levels of national politics. He won credit for helping to persuade President Richard Nixon that he needed to take television seriously, that it was becoming the most effective way to reach the American voter. He did the same thing years later when he used television to help Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush win the presidency.

He was not alone in believing that the mainstream news media was leaving part of America behind — his own part — while abetting a liberal agenda in Washington. Nor was he the only person to come up with the idea of a news network that would have a special appeal to conservative-leaning Americans.

But he was the first to truly pull it off.

That he was able to do so was attributable to his own mixed pedigree as a onetime television and theater producer and political strategist, with blue-collar Ohio roots.

All of his career moves included the same ingredients: an appreciation of the power of television, a sense of theatricality and a deep resentment of the “New York-Hollywood elitists” who he believed populated the rest of the news media and looked down on his America.

“They just believe what they believe and they think their job is to drag the rest of the redneck morons toward the light,” Mr. Ailes told me in an interview in his office in December 2014. “They don’t understand that the so-called redneck morons — the people they don’t like — are the people that grew up with values — patriotism, all those things — and they hate all those words.”

Mr. Ailes, who regularly reminded associates that he dug ditches as a teenager, told me, “I built Fox News on my own life experience; I built it understanding the pressures and the worries and the aspirations of average Americans.”

“I love those people,” he added. And he took credit for “forcing some people to actually acknowledge that others exist in the world beside the people who went to Elaine’s back in the old days,” he said.

That view certainly helped Mr. Ailes establish Fox News as an exclusive, political and cultural safe space for a large segment of the cable news audience. A Pew Research Center poll in January found that 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox News as their main source of news. As Pew put it, “There was no single source as pronounced among Clinton voters.” And his vision made Fox News a major profit generator for its parent company, 21st Century Fox.

It also helped form the conservative-leaning populist movement that brought his friend Mr. Trump to the White House.

But for Mr. Ailes, understanding the audience was no more important than the onscreen, physical presentation of his hosts — something he learned from his days as a young producer for “The Mike Douglas Show” — and he would never let his stars forget that television was a visual medium.

“I used to work with talent back in ‘The Mike Douglas Show’; you could tell the pros,” he told me. “Pearl Bailey walked out and said, ‘Where’s my mark?’ I said, ‘That’s your first mark, that’s your second mark,’ and she said, ‘When’s that happening?”

It was all by way of telling me, “a pro will walk through and look at all that — Reagan used to look at that.”

But Mr. Ailes’s feel for presentation — men wore suits, women wore skirts — also fed an old-world sense of gender roles. That may have comforted some core members of the Fox News audience but it also came to symbolize a climate in which, according to the allegations against him, he lorded his power over female staff members in predatory fashion.

I was in Mr. Ailes’s office that day in 2014 for a New York Times Magazine profile I was writing about Megyn Kelly, whose newfound stardom was registering as another example of Mr. Ailes’s eye for talent.

Ms. Kelly, in the end, helped end his run at Fox News, when she stepped forward to tell lawyers investigating allegations against Mr. Ailes that he had harassed her, too.

Now Ms. Kelly is at NBC, Mr. Ailes has passed and Fox News faces a new and uncertain future.

But then, in the era of the presidency he helped forge, so does the rest of the divided news media landscape he leaves behind.

Jaclyn Peiser contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: By Mining a Divided America, He Upended the News Media. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe